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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2015
that the Met should have obtained
more concessions, Morris told me that
he's convinced it was the best deal pos-
sible under the circumstances. No one
wanted to see the house go dark.
A few weeks after the settlement,
Gelb and Phillips had dinner at Jean-
Georges on Columbus Circle. Phillips
told him that morale was still low, and
he asked what he could do. She stressed
that the orchestra was willing to help
with donors, education e orts, and
public outreach. She proposed open
orchestra rehearsals that board mem-
bers could attend. Gelb seemed amena-
ble. But even then he managed to stir
up resentments. He cancelled a Sirius
Radio broadcast of the orchestra's up-
coming concert at Carnegie Hall, de-
spite the fact that James Levine o ered
to pay the twenty-thousand-dollar cost
from his own pocket. Phillips said the
orchestra had always viewed those con-
certs as a way to attract new audiences.
Gelb told her that the board had ques-
tioned the need for any Carnegie con-
certs at all. "Then you have a problem
with your board, because these con-
certs are good for everybody," Phillips
replied.
The season's opening night, on Sep-
tember 23rd, featured a new production
of "The Marriage of Figaro" by Rich-
ard Eyre. Eyre had spoken of fiscal re-
straint, but there were problems with
his set, a rotating structure of bronze
tracery suggesting the Moorish archi-
tecture of Seville, where the story takes
place. (The action is updated from the
eighteenth century to the
nineteen-thirties.) A fire
inspector concluded that
the set material was highly
inflammable, so the Met
had to station a fire truck
in the loading dock, at a
cost of twenty-five hun-
dred dollars per perfor-
mance. (The Met said that
this is a common practice, including at
Broadway theatres.)
Worse, from the orchestra's point of
view, the set compromised the music. At
one rehearsal, Eyre insisted that the de-
signer had assured him the material
would reflect sound. But the set was po-
rous, and much sound vanished into the
back of the stage. The prompter box,
normally at the front of center stage, had
been moved into the orchestra pit. The
conductor, Levine, discovered that the
placement of the box bifurcated the or-
chestra, and players couldn't see each
other. Gelb initially refused to move it,
on the ground that it wouldn't fit into
the set. Levine insisted, and it was re-
turned to the stage.
The incident reinforced the orches-
tra's conviction that Gelb cares more
about staging than music. Relations
between Gelb and Levine are said to
have been tense ever since, but both
men insist that they have a good work-
ing relationship.
Meanwhile, Gelb's continued e orts
at cost-cutting alienated Old Guard
board members. After Gelb laid o
Sissy Strauss, a longtime artist liaison
who took care of visiting singers and
threw an annual star-studded Christ-
mas party, Lovett, the honorary director
living in Monte Carlo, fired o an angry
letter to Kennedy and Zi :
I am among those truly loyal to the Met
and who have hopes that an upward course
will soon be found to reverse the Gelb de-
scent, artistic and nancial (expenses and
ticket prices are the only things going up-
wards). Any business would have long ago
gone to the bottom and found what was
wrong---the general manager---and got rid
of him. His business plan continues to fail,
and the board continues to support it.
In November, the Met released its
preliminary results for the fiscal
year that ended July 31st: an operat-
ing deficit of twenty-two million dol-
lars---a record in absolute terms and,
as a percentage of the operating bud-
get, the largest in thirty
years. Most of the loss was
accounted for by a drop
in contributions from
major donors.
Gelb told the board in
January that attendance
was stabilizing this season
at about seventy per cent
of capacity. By mid-Feb-
ruary, box-o ce revenue was running
about two million dollars behind bud-
get. Whatever the artistic and politi-
cal merits of "The Death of Kling-
ho er," the controversial opera by John
Adams about the murder by Palestin-
ian terrorists of a Jewish passenger on
a cruise ship, it sold seventy-four per
cent of capacity---not bad for a con-
temporary opera but a dismal turnout
for a new production. Some revivals of
Gelb productions have fared worse. A
performance of "Les Contes d'Ho -
mann" sold just forty-six per cent. "Don
Giovanni" and "La Traviata" sold sev-
enty per cent and seventy-three per
cent, respectively, which is low for such
stalwarts of the repertoire. Attendance
at pre-Gelb-era standbys has also fal-
tered this season. The Met said that
attendance at Taymor's full-length
"Magic Flute" averaged just sixty-one
per cent; at Ze relli's "La Bohème" it
was seventy-eight per cent. Despite
the weak box-o ce results, Gelb said
the Met is on course to have a bal-
anced budget this year, thanks to cost
cuts and increased fund-raising, in-
cluding funds for the new campaign.
Cost cutting and fund-raising have
their limits, though. As the Met has
put it, "The level of giving simply can-
not continue to grow faster than our
rising costs."
"You can't continue with a very weak
box-o ce when opera houses all over
the world are filling their seats," Bruce
Crawford, an honorary director and
former general manager and presi-
dent, said. Bruce Kovner said, "I adore
the Met, and it's one of the great cul-
tural institutions in music and the
world. I want to see it succeed. But I
want it to do better than it is, espe-
cially on its finances."
Last year, the Met had to draw down
seventeen million of its thirty-million-
dollar line of credit and, to renew it,
had to pledge a security interest in the
two Chagall murals at the front of the
opera house---"The Sources of Music"
and "The Triumph of Music." That
leaves only thirteen million dollars. In
December, Moody's Investors Service
downgraded the Met's bond rating,
citing its "weakened financial profile"
and "deep operating deficit" leading
to "a marked decline in unrestricted
liquidity." In February, Bank of Amer-
ica agreed to extend the Met's credit
line only after it agreed to pledge two
Maillol bronzes, "L'Été" and "Venus
Without Arms," on display on the
Grand Tier.
The piecemeal pledging of the Met's
tangible assets has contributed to a
sense of financial desperation, even as
artistic standards remain high. "The
musical quality is superb," Crawford